June 23, 2010

For writers, being able to focus is critical. As Stephen Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Getting Sidetracked

What keeps us from focusing? Distractions. They have always been with us. Agatha Christie once said, “I enjoy writing in the desert. There are no distractions such as telephones, theaters, opera houses and gardens.”

While our modern-day distractions have changed a bit (e-mails to answer, Twitter tweeting at you, instant movies to watch on Netflix), the result of being sidetracked by them remains the same. We don’t finish our writing. We don’t study guidelines and mail that manuscript. We don’t follow up on marketing tips. If we stall long enough, we may quit altogether.

So how do we deal with things that take us away from our writing? Try adapting the Serenity Prayer for this purpose: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the distractions I cannot change, courage to change the distractions I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Wisdom to Know

What are some distractions you cannot change or ignore? Sometimes it’s a sick child or spouse or a crisis with a friend. Sometimes your boss gives you an overtime assignment with a “now” deadline. There may be a project that needs to be attended to without delay, like your teenager’s last-minute college entrance application. This type of interruption or distraction you have little control over. You grin and bear it.

However, we need wisdom to know the difference between the distractions that are unavoidable and those we allow–or even encourage. Chances are, you’re your own worst enemy when it comes to distractions that keep you from writing. So take courage! Change what you can in order to focus on your writing.

1. Use an answering machine to screen calls. Better yet, turn the ringer off altogether so you’re not tempted to pick up when you hear your best friend’s voice. Then return calls at lunch time or when you’ve finished your daily writing stint.

2. Isolate yourself as much as possible from the traffic flow. I now have my own office, but I’ve written in family rooms and bedrooms and dens. The family room was the most difficult with constant interruptions of TV, kids, and doorbells. The more you can shut the door on distractions, the easier you’ll find it to focus.

3. Take note of your own personal distractions. The blinds in my office are pulled because I look outside every time a car/garbage truck/motorcycle/UPS truck/bus/delivery truck goes by. I also remove all chocolate from my work space. Even hidden in the back of a drawer, it calls to me while I work and distracts me, whether I stop to eat it or not.

4. Leave the mail alone. Reading e-mail and checking Facebook or Twitter can be a major distraction. It interrupts your flow. And if your e-mail contains rejection letters and online bank statements, it can create an instant slump. So get the snail-mail if you must, but stash it in a basket until the end of the day when you’re done writing. The same is true for e-mail. Leave it unopened and unread till late afternoon (unless it’s a response from an editor!).

5. For non-emergencies, make your family wait. Barter with your family for writing time. When you’re finished, you’ll make popcorn. When you’re finished, you’ll play catch. When you’re finished, you’ll go rent a movie. (Just be sure you actually follow through on your promises!)

6. Leave home. If home is too chaotic sometimes, take your work to the library or a park or a cafe, somewhere quiet with no phone and a minimum of distractions. This is an individual thing, by the way. A quiet library study room is helpful to me. A Starbucks full of people and food is way too many distractions!

7. Organize your work space first. Arrange your work space before you begin writing, to ensure that you have everything you need. Don’t run out of paper halfway through printing your chapter. Keep things within reach. Even finding a new ink cartridge or box of paper clips in your supply closet can distract you. Before you know it, you’ve spent half an hour rearranging the closet shelves.

8. Silence can be golden. Are you as distracted by noise as I am? I run a fan on high speed for white noise, and during school vacations I also used ear plugs. If traffic bothers you–or if you’re in a quiet neighborhood where twittering birds distract you–close the windows during your writing time.

9. Change your schedule. Get up earlier and write when the world is still asleep. Phones don’t ring. Kids don’t interrupt. Your spouse is still snoring. (This works equally well if you’re a night owl and can write after the world shuts down for the night.)

10. Eat healthy meals at regular intervals. Avoid the distraction of a growling stomach or a hunger headache. If you’re always thirsty, keep cold drinks within reach. I know someone who keeps a mini-refrigerator in his office, filled with bottled water and fresh fruit, to keep him from constantly running to the kitchen.

Focus!

Take time to study yourself, discovering your own favorite distractions. Once in a while we have absolutely no control over interruptions. However, most of the time, we (consciously or not) use distractions to keep us from having to face the work and anxiety of putting words on paper.

If you had to name your biggest distraction, what would it be? And if you have a tip for dealing with that distraction, please share it! We can learn so much from each other.

12 Comments »

1. 

   I am still really new at this writing thing, but one of the things I have found that works in ways of electronic distractions is to check my emails, facebook and all of those thing first thing in the morning. When I hit a slump during the day and am tempted to turn to these distractions I remind myself that I have taken care of them all ready, there is no point in doing it again!
   If anybody has great tips for dealing with pregnancy discomforts as distractions, I’d love to hear them – I’m trying to ignore the headaches and sit down with my homework assignment!

   Comment by Andrea — June 23, 2010 @ 11:19 am

2. 

   Golden advice.

   Comment by Beth Mac — June 23, 2010 @ 12:20 pm

3. 

   Mine is daydreaming. Or what I like to think of as plotting in my mind. I get so absorbed in thinking that I don’t get much written down during the time that I have allotted to write.

   Comment by Vicki Spivey — June 23, 2010 @ 12:24 pm

4. 

   My biggest distraction is definitely the internet, especially just searching for things I’m interested in. Facebook can be a distraction too. I shut off all notifications from FB and that helps some. I totally agree with you though – I do find that I use distractions to put off doing something else.

   Comment by Dianne — June 23, 2010 @ 6:56 pm

5. 

   Noise is my biggest distraction. When I actually make money from writing, the first thing I will invest in is a laptop but till then, it’s the family computer in the livingroom (so placed for my teenage stepdaughters’ not-so-private internet use!) I very recently (like two days ago) discovered that if I put my earphones in and open a Youtube screen with classical music, I can get a lot done! (It takes less time than downloading classical music onto an iPod, which I don’t own anyway.) Classical music = very pleasant white noise, and it actually goes quite nicely with the setting of my novel.

   Comment by Yvette — June 23, 2010 @ 7:47 pm

6. 

   My biggest distraction is family (i.e. children). Yesterday, I unknowingly used tip #5, make them wait. I said when the timer rings, we’ll go outside and do slip-and-slide. Since it was getting late (already after dinner), I had written quite a bit already, but I was on the verge of finishing my latest revision. I set the timer for an hour, and didn’t tell the kids for how long I set it. I knew, er hoped, I would be finished in less than that amount of time. I finished in 35 minutes, but made the timer ding so they would know I was done. It worked! But I certainly couldn’t use it for an un-interrupted 8-hr stint. Just another idea to stash into my bag of tricks. Will definitely use it again. In the mornings, they like to watch movies, so I’ll grab a bit of writing time then, before we all get hungry for breakfast. Of course that only works in the summers, and Saturdays.

   Comment by Christie Wild — June 24, 2010 @ 6:45 am

7. 

   Ooh. I like the idea Christie said about the timer.
   My big distractions are noise (namely conversations – TV, my kids) and e-mail. I need to turn the chime off. Every ding makes me feel I have to check it. Of course, having a ms on submission does not help.

   Great post as always, Kristi!

   Comment by Kristin Gray — June 24, 2010 @ 3:18 pm

8. 

   Thanks, everyone, for all the sharing and the good ideas you’re already putting to use. You gave me a couple of good ideas for myself! Sometimes it’s the simplest, smallest changes that make the biggest difference.

   Comment by Kristi Holl — June 25, 2010 @ 5:39 pm

9. 

   my biggest distraction is the internet. I may start writing but then have a doubt an go check it out on google and pretty soon I have 12 open tabs, all full of fascinating stuf… My week can go like this.

   So if you suffer the same addiction, my tip is: download “Freedom”. Freedom is for mac, but there’s other stuff for PC’s. It`s a program that disconects you from the internet for as long as 100 minutes (you decide how long) and it has helped me a ton. Has it come to this? Yes it has come to this!

   I discovered your site today and love it already. I am bookmarking it for the moments when I`m not with Freedom

   Comment by Laia — June 28, 2010 @ 7:13 pm

10. 

    Laia, how smart you are! So few people are willing to take drastic action to deal with a self-discipline problem. I had never heard of “Freedom” (but I have a PC). I’ll have to find out what the PC version is! Thank you for sharing about this.

    Comment by Kristi Holl — June 29, 2010 @ 6:38 am

11. 

    About disconnecting from the Internet: On my laptop, there’s a prominent button to push to turn off network connections. Easy! I use that to extend my battery time when I’m working away from an electric plug — like out on the patio. But it could be used to avoid Internet distractions. And there’s always just shutting down your Internet browser and email programs. They don’t HAVE to be open, folks! Work with just your word processing program open.

    Other people around form my biggest distraction. Why should I expect them to respect my need to work if I can’t do the same when they say something? So moving myself to a people-free environment is the best solution for me.

    Comment by Nancy — July 1, 2010 @ 9:14 pm

12. 

    I’m looking for that button on my laptop, Nancy, but I don’t see it. But you’re right–you DON’T have to be connected online in order to work. That’s partly why I have a DSL line. When the cord is disconnected–and it’s a very SHORT cord–I can’t be online.

    Yes, a people-free environment is the easiest.

    Comment by Kristi Holl — July 6, 2010 @ 5:53 am

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